WHAT do investors who bought into Singapore Shipping, Low Keng Huat, Singapore Petroleum Company or Inter-Roller Engineering five years ago - and still hold these stocks - have in common?
Well, all of them are in the enviable position of holding pure profits. Their initial capital outlay has been recouped in the form of dividends paid by the companies.
Besides the above four companies, others that have distributed total dividends that equal or exceed their share price five years ago include Hupsteel, Cosco, Hersing, Superbowl, Rotary Engineering and Hotel Plaza, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg. And this is the case too for Singapore Exchange, Raffles Education and Tat Hong.
Take Singapore Shipping Corp. In May 2003, it was trading at 17.5 cents. So one lot cost $175. In the past five years, the company has paid $435 of dividends per 1,000 shares. This came from, among other things, the distribution of cash after the company disposed of vessels and sold off its stakes in a subsidiary and associated companies.
And as of yesterday, the stock was trading at 44 cents or $440 for one lot. In all, assuming an investor had pocketed the dividends and left them in the bank earning a miserable 0.5 per cent a year, an investment in Singapore Shipping in the past five years would have yielded a compounded return of 38 per cent a year.
Singapore Shipping is the most generous dividend payer of all Singapore-listed companies between 2003 and now. Low Keng Huat is second, having paid 46 cents of dividends versus its share price of 27 cents in 2003.
Of the 14 companies mentioned, all but one were trading below $1 five years ago. The exception was Singapore Exchange, which in May 2003 had a market price of $1.25. Since then, it has distributed $1.368 cash back to investors.
For the likes of Singapore Shipping, Low Keng Huat, SuperBowl and Inter-Roller, the dividends actually boosted their total returns by more than 10 percentage points a year. And in each case, the capital appreciation has also been quite substantial.
However, there are yield stocks in the true sense of the words, in that yield is all what one gets, without much capital appreciation - well, at least in the past five years.
One such stock is Singapore Press Holdings. The total return of the stock in the past five years - again, assuming the dividends are deposited into a savings account paying just 0.5 per cent a year - was 10.3 per cent.
The bulk of the return came from cash distributions made by the company. During the period, the share price only managed to edge up 2 per cent a year.
Others that are commonly known as yield stocks fared better, benefiting from the overall bull market of the past five years. For example, Singapore Post managed a total return of 19 per cent a year between 2003 and now. Of that, 7.2 percentage points was from dividends and about 12 percentage points from capital appreciation.
Blue-chip returns
Meanwhile, blue- chip stocks that have paid quite significant dividends include Dairy Farm. Shareholders would have got back 93 per cent of their capital had they invested in the stock in May 2003. Six percentage points of its 36 per cent annual total return was from dividends.
Shareholders of Sembcorp Industries would have received back 83 per cent of their initial investment, with some 6 percentage points of the stock's 34 per cent compounded annual return coming from dividends.
As for Keppel Corp, it has distributed $3.29 of dividends compared with its share price of $4.56 five years ago. Dividends accounted for 4 percentage points of its total return of 42 per cent a year.
Now let's take a look at the best-performing stocks on the Singapore bourse in the past five years.
Topping the list is Cosco Corp. Its recent decline notwithstanding, the stock has more than doubled every year in the past five years. Its total return is 105 per cent a year. Raffles Education is second, with an annual return of 87 per cent. It is closely followed by Golden Agri-Resources with an annual return of about 85 per cent.
See Hup Seng, Baker Tech, CSC Holdings, Yongnam and Asia Food and Properties are the next best performers, each chalking up returns of between 62 per cent and 74 per cent .
Of the top eight, three did not pay a single cent of dividend in the past five years. They are See Hup Seng, Baker Tech and Yongnam. For the rest, the dividends added less than 2 per cent a year to the overall return.
Still, for Cosco and Raffles Education, dividends paid in the past five years have more than exceeded the capital investment then.
Overall, companies listed on Singapore Exchange returned an average of 15.2 per cent a year in the past five years. The median is 15.7 per cent. Some 100 out of the 400 companies actually chalked up negative returns.
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